Personal Narrative: Lessons From A Lake

Lessons from a Lake After spending two long months of the summer working on a lake house my family had purchased in June, I learned hard work truly is rewarding. While I recognize that I am extraordinarily fortunate my parents had the money to even purchase the house, it was most definitely a fixer-upper and required labor to turn it into a home. Oftentimes when completing a task, it can be difficult to take a step back and examine what one gained from the experience. This becomes even more true in cases where the labor was especially frustrating or demanding. The worker then becomes less and less motivated and therefore less and less productive. For these reasons, I had only half-believed people when they told me how rewarding hard work …show more content…
After completing several tasks that each showed me how hard work is rewarding, I was beginning to believe in the concept, and making the final touch-ups to the house simply confirmed my belief. While vacuuming throughout the house, I encountered all of the furniture I moved in, and its appealing appearance reminded me of all the effort which had gone into making the house look so nice. Then, after other final improvements, such as raking, were completed, I walked throughout the property and realized just how much of an impact my work had had. The lake house and the surrounding area initially looked rather unattractive when my family and I first arrived, but after months of work, and with the few final touch-ups, it had a near-perfect appearance. I could hardly believe the product of mine and my family’s labor, and realized hard work truly does yield …show more content…
I knew it would take a lot of labor, but I had no idea how much that labor would teach me. In his essay “Education,” Ralph Waldo Emerson tells a similar story of a man who was rewarded when he put forth hard work and effort to uncover the history behind an artifact: “He… bought a Greek grammar and learned the language; he read history and studied ancient art to explain his stones… But mark that in the task he had achieved an excellent education…” (190). Clearly it is a widespread belief, but I did not learn how rewarding hard work can be until I worked on the lake house, and I now find it easier to recognize the positive outcomes after a task, even one where the benefits are not as obvious and visible as those of the lake house project. When a person has the awareness and ability to recognize the fruits of their labor, it motivates them to work even harder and creates a positive environment. David Foster Wallace discusses the importance of this ability to be aware of something like the benefits of effort in his speech “This Is Water”: “... it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what… is really important - if you want to operate on your default-setting - then you, like me, won’t consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have

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